Compile farm?

[Matt Okeefe]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2001 at 08:58:26AM -0500, Strange, John wrote:
> Well you can use mexec with mosix to get things to work, and it does work
> quite well but it doesn't scale because of some underlying filesystem
> problems we are having.
> 
> I've got 25 machines, our backend storage currently is netapp filers, so
> using NFS I have to turn off client side caching.  It basically crushes the
> filer doing constant file handling lookups.  I'm still playing with a netapp
> that we have on spare, maybe I'll have some luck with finding away around
> the problems that we are having.
> 
> There is no really good backend filesystem that you can use, maybe GFS but
> it's still relatively new and too bleeding edge for pratical use. (IMHO)

Actually there are a fair number of people using it in production,
in some cases for nearly a year, I can give you references if you like.  
None have complained of data corruption due to GFS.

> Plus we don't have the hardware for it fiber channel and we have *NO*
> budget.

The next release of GFS will include an improved shared IP
network block driver, called GNBD.  You can run it over Ethernet
or Myrinet, or whatever network you have.

Matt O'Keefe
Sistina Software, Inc.

> 
> If anyone has any suggestions I would glad to hear them.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> John Strange
> Marconi
> john.ws.strange.at.marconi.com
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Thomason [mailto:SThomaso at phmining.com]
> Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 2:25 PM
> To: Beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: Compile farm?
> 
> 
> Greetings. I'm interested in setting up a shell account/batch
> process/compile farm system for our developers, and I'm wondering if Beowulf
> clusters are well suited to that task. We're not interested in writing
> parallel code using PVM or MPI, we just want to log into what appears to be
> one big server and have it dispatch the workload amongst the slave
> processors. Is Beowulf good at that?
> ---scott
> 
> p.s. Sorry if there are duplicates of this message; I used the wrong email
> address earlier.
> 
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